Tourists and music have returned to New Orleans’ French Quarter. This Saturday, a band of trumpets and trombones toured the alleys of the historic center. The notes of jazz, blues and rock emerged again from the bars of Bourbon Street. Under the watch of a heavy police presence, on foot, on horseback or in patrol cars, queues of visitors waited for tables in restaurants offering local specialties, from soup gumboto the carabineros stew. Until you reach the corner of Bourbon Street and Canal Road: here, where former military man Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove his vehicle into the crowd celebrating the New Year and killed 14 people, what prevails is silence.
On one side of the corner, 14 improvised crosses carry photos of the deceased, obtained from newspaper clippings. On the other, the wall has become a point of homage, where passers-by place candles, stuffed animals, and carnival necklaces. The French Consulate has left a wreath of flowers. An artist completes a mural. Around the names of the dead, those who pass by are invited to leave a written message of encouragement. A police truck protects the access; Mobile protective barriers nicknamed bowsabsent on New Year’s Eve and that the Chief of Police of New Orleans, Anne Kirkpatrick, has acknowledged that she did not know that she had them at the time. Since Thursday they have been all over the French Quarter.
The attack by Jabbar, who carried a flag of the Islamic State (ISIS) in his rented truck and was “100% inspired” by this terrorist group, according to the FBI, has put US authorities on guard. , who fear a possible imitation effect. The actions of the former military man, added to the explosion of a Cybertruck vehicle in front of a hotel owned by President-elect Donald Trump in Las Vegas, have revealed serious shortcomings in public protection. In New Orleans, a security firm had already warned in a report in 2019 of the risks of an attack in the French Quarter using a vehicle to run over pedestrians, according to the newspaper. The New York Times. The bollards installed to block road traffic access to Bourbon Street “do not seem to work,” according to the firm, which recommended their immediate repair. This New Year’s, the device was being repaired.
There are fears that a similar attack could be repeated as the country faces key events: on Monday, Congress must certify Donald Trump’s electoral victory, the same day that marks four years since the assault on the Capitol perpetrated by supporters of the Republican politician; The state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter will be held on Thursday; Trump’s presidential inauguration will take place on the 20th, a process that will include a parade through the capital and several gala balls.
New Orleans itself also faces massive events in the coming weeks: next month it will host the Super Bowl, the final of the American football competition, and its famous carnival celebrations, Mardi Gras.
The transition teams of outgoing President Joe Biden and Trump have been in contact about the inauguration ceremony after the New Orleans attack, the White House revealed this weekend.
“The security of the inauguration and those attending is the highest priority for all of us in the Government,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday. “We work intensely every day to guarantee the security of the ceremony against any type of attack,” he added. The Washington Police have announced a reinforcement of their security measures for the coming weeks.
Now, the FBI is investigating what, exactly, was Jabbar’s radicalization process, which had not attracted anyone’s attention due to its extremism. 42 years old, he was born and raised in Texas, where his father had converted to Islam before he was born. His mother had maintained the Christian faith and the family had never been particularly practicing. His friends talk about excessive drinking during his university days. Some excesses that ended when he joined the army as a computer specialist. There he had an exemplary career, he was assigned to Afghanistan and won a medal for his good work.
The return seems to have been more complicated. He returned to the University in Georgia, and there he acknowledged in an interview with a local media that he had difficulties adapting to civilian routine. His family life began to fall apart: he has been divorced three times. Despite a good salary as an employee at the consulting firm Deloitte, he began to incur debts, which forced him to look for a second source of income as a real estate agent. Increasingly interested in his religion, he adopted more extreme positions: in some SoundCloud recordings from a year ago he compares music to the “voice of Satan,” as revealed by the newspaper. The Times-Picayune from New Orleans. In recent months he had moved to a trailer in a Muslim neighborhood of Houston, where he lived an isolated life. In the videos he recorded immediately before the New Year’s attack, he declared his loyalty to the Islamic State, although investigators have so far found no evidence of contact with the movement or any other terrorist organization.
The fact that he acted alone provides little relief to investigators. “A lone wolf is much more worrying and dangerous for American counterterrorism officials. It is much more difficult for intelligence services and security forces to discover their plans. “That is even more complicated if the attacker has radicalized himself, receiving inspiration and guidance from ISIS propaganda over the internet,” says Marc Polymeropoulos, of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security of the think tank Atlantic Council.
“While it is of course a relief to know that there are no followers of the Islamic State roaming New Orleans and threatening public safety, we must not let our guard down. “The methods of a lone wolf using a vehicle to attack are very easy to imitate and present immense challenges to the detection-interruption-deterrence counterintelligence strategies that have been so effective in the past,” adds the expert.
Precisely, a bulletin from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the anti-terrorist services issued this Friday expressed concern about the possibility of “imitation or revenge attacks” after the massive attack perpetrated by Jabbar. “It is likely that these types of attacks will remain attractive to potential attackers, given how easy it is to obtain a vehicle and how little knowledge is needed to carry them out,” he warns.
And although ISIS today is a shadow of what it was a decade ago, when it declared a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq before a US-led coalition dismantled it, it maintains its propaganda on the internet and continues to recruit sympathizers, he recalls. His brand continues to attract, as the Jabbar case has shown, those who wish to perpetrate violence in the name of a radical Islamic ideology.
Added to this risk, according to the report, is that other Internet users have cited attacks such as Jabbar’s to launch “general calls for violence against specific groups, including immigrants and Muslims.”
In the French Quarter, meanwhile, groups of tourists continue their guided tours along supposedly ghostly routes or crowd into art galleries and souvenir shops. Although the feeling of security is fragile: the lights and siren of an ambulance at full speed silenced the diners of a restaurant on one of its main streets, Royal Street, for a few seconds. “Sorry, it’s not my favorite sound lately,” a waitress apologized, continuing to take note of a briefly interrupted order.
